The Hyperexamined Life

At the age of 21, in his last year of college, Dave
Eggers lost both his parents to cancer. Dad went suddenly, unexpectedly; Mom lingered a little more than a month longer, confined to the living-room sofa while her four children hovered, watching her spit bile into a half-moon-shaped bowl, validating hallucinations induced by malignancy and morphine. In their parents absence, Eggers and his two older siblings, Beth and Bill, were left to raise their 7-year-old brother Toph, a responsibility that fell primarily to Eggers. Given these unfair and tragic circumstances, he did what any self-respecting young writer would do: He took notes.

You can snigger at the title of his eventual book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius  Eggers expects you to. Call him cloying and manipulative, chide him for dumping yet another memoir on the market  hes ready for it. In his extremely funny acknowledgments, he even offers some advice to the memoir-resistant: PRETEND ITS FICTION. In those first 20 pages, which acknowledge not just helpful people and institutions but the authors own shortcomings and the major themes of his book, Eggers begins an inquiry into the value and purpose of first-person storytelling, which he pursues through another 350-odd pages. While the author is self-conscious about being self-referential, he is also knowing about that self-conscious self-referentiality, he confesses in a Mobius strip of narcissism. This isnt the hyper-intellectualized meta-narrative of David Foster Wallace, nor does Eggers write with the resigned awareness of a Don DeLillo character; surprisingly, for an under-30 writer who launched an ultra-clever Bay Area magazine in the mid-90s called Might (and who now issues the hyper-ironic quarterly McSweeneys), Eggers is earnest. He knows that real life cannot be captured without humor  not even a death watch  but his sense of humor is decidedly Midwestern: homespun, self-effacing and a little knuckleheaded. We are waiting for everything to finally stop working, he writes of his mothers last moments, the organs and systems, one by one, throwing up their hands  The jig is up, says the endocrine; I did what I could, says the stomach, or whats left of it; Well get em next time, adds the heart, with a friendly punch to the shoulder. His experimental style is more Lorrie Moore and The Onion than Richard Brautigan.

And in that context, he is a writer of dizzying talent. Death takes some 41 pages, and it is a brilliant, beautiful, deliriously vivid account, tender at times but never, ever maudlin. He describes how his sister saw his father keel over in the driveway: He was kneeling, but with his hands on the ground, fingers extended down, like roots from a riverbed tree. He was not praying. His mothers cancer looked to the doctors, he imagines, like a million little
podules, each a tiny city of cancer, each with an unruly, sprawling, environmentally careless citizenry with no zoning laws whatsoever. The atmosphere around their house grows increasingly eerie as Mom fades away: Everyday activities  ordering pizza, Toph playing video games, watching The Love Connection  take on a ponderous finality; casual banter is loaded with significance. (Does it hurt? What? The spitting. No, it feels good, stupid.) Moments after her death, Eggers watches his little brother sleep: [He] turns around and around, like the hand of a clock. His breathing is audible. His eyelashes are long. His hand hangs over the foldout bed. This is prose so full its nearly tactile  you feel as though you can reach into the page and run your fingers through it.

Only when Eggers and his siblings head west does the self-consciousness he warned of get a toehold. Shell-shocked but reinforced by a profound sense of entitlement and the mixed blessing of utter freedom, they fully expect to be looked after by an embarrassed and sorry world. Accordingly, their activities have a pre-recorded quality, as if the whole point of engaging in them were to describe them to others later. Oh, we are good, he says of himself and Toph playing Frisbee on the beach. We take four steps for each throw, and when we throw the world stops and gasps. They are also, as Eggers is acutely aware, inhabiting a luxurious crawlspace between parent-child and peer status. Our relationship, at least in terms of its terms and its rules, is wonderfully flexible, he writes. When something doesnt get done, we both shrug, because technically, neither of us is responsible.

For all its bluster, A.H.W.O.S.G., as the author refers to it,remains at this point a sincere account of a life lived with one foot in experience, another in narrative. As badly as Eggers wants the world to be watching him, he worries that no one really is. We expected our progress to be more closely followed, he says, to be checked up on by his parents friends back home. Hes at his best when his sense of being watched is merely an elaborate fantasy: Racked with guilt over leaving Toph with a babysitter for the first time, Eggers riffs on the consequences of child neglect, which culminate in his cross-examination at a show trial:

And you left your brother to go where?

Out. To bars.

To bars. And what was at these bars?

Friends, people, beer.

Beer.

There was a special, I think.

A special.

On the beer. Certain kinds 

Some 150 pages in, however, everything changes. Eggers magazine, Might, appears as if out of nowhere. One moment hes talking big with a friend; the next, the magazine that will change this world and all future worlds has become reality. His contempt for this episode in his life, evident in that overblown description and all that follows, feels perfunctory, as if enthusiasm always deserves ridicule. Eggers swaggers through the futility of producing a magazine in the same way that he suffers through the shame of auditioning for MTVs The Real World, the television analog of the book he set out to construct: sneering all the way, but acutely aware that his sneering is a posture.

The part-fiction transcript of Eggers interview with Real World producer Laura Folger has the makings of a masterful piece of cultural meta-commentary in which the author gets a chance to explain himself  his economic background, his disrespect for privacy (Cheap, overabundant, easily gotten, lost, regained, bought, sold) and dismissal of dignity (Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves). But theres too much of it. In fact, theres too much of a lot in this book, and the fourth time he returns to his paranoia about the babysitter for laughs, it becomes clear that Eggers needed an editor  someone intimidated by neither his youth nor his apparent grooviness, someone who could have helped him hone A.H.W.O.S.G. into a testament to voyeurism and self-centeredness, a treatise on the Age of the Jennicam. Instead, Eggers reveals himself as a tremendously gifted writer who hasnt quite read enough, or lived enough, to act so wise.

Eggers himself says  again, in those catchall acknowledgments  that his book is uneven after the first 200 pages. Hes right. So why didnt he fix it? Does he consider indulgence cool? Cute? By writing about himself being written about, he wants to declare all criticism moot, to make it ridiculous to find fault, to make it impossible to write about him. He is fully cognizant, way ahead of you he writes of himself, in terms of knowing about and fully admitting the gimmickry inherent in all of this, and will preempt your claim of the books irrelevance due to said gimmickry by saying that the gimmickry is simply a device . . . This preempting extends to matters beyond his approach to storytelling: Eggers implies that because he is aware of his racism, his racism is acceptable, that because he understands cynicism to be a phony posture, his cynicism is forgivable. He invents a scene in which his suicidal friend John accuses him of using other peoples agony as anecdotal fodder, which doesnt make it any less irritating that no one in this book emerges as anything more than a foil for the narrator  not even, amazingly, Toph. Eggers little brother, who seemed so real and dear early on, survives in the end as just another commentator on Eggers art. Dont you see this as a kind of cannibalism? he has Toph inquire of Mights use of celebrities. Its supposed to be funny  Youre breaking out of character again, Eggers warns him  but it plays as just another reminder that Eggers imploded world has ceased to be interesting.

Perhaps even to him. Examining ones life just enough to sell it, but not enough to understand it, must get tedious after a while, when ones existence finally becomes a series of anecdotes mediated by narrative, an exercise in standing outside oneself, observing oneself experiencing life. Toward the end of A.H.W.O.S.G.,
Eggers has only begun to be aware of his condition. As he drinks beer with old friends on a visit to Chicago, he thinks to himself, I am kicking back. You wish that for his sake he could.

A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS: Based on a True Story | By DAVE EGGERS
Simon & Schuster | 375 pages | $23 hardcover

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